This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is also known as a web page address, and is an identification method used for completely describing addresses of web pages and other resources in Internet.
There are no requirements on a length of a URL in Internet communication protocol RFC 2616 “Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1”. In fact, limitation of the URL length is determined by two aspects: requirements of a client browser and settings of a server side. For example, a Microsoft Internet Explorer limits the URL length within 2083 bytes, but a maximum length which can be used actually is 2048 bytes.
At present, in the Internet, many services and applications used for providing message presentation have limited message lengths. For example, micro-blog, as a passive message broadcast mechanism, generally limits the length of each message (i.e., a micro-blog article) to 140 characters, Instant Messaging (IM) system generally limits a length of a state signature of each IM user to 50 characters or so, and broadcast messages of some systems also have requirements on lengths of message content as limitations of message window sizes. These messages which have limitations on the length often need to include a URL. For example, a user may introduce an online article which he/she saw recently within his/her signature or a micro-blog article, then the user needs to add a web page address (later referred as URL) of this online article to his/her signature or the micro-blog article. Because there are no limitations on the URL length, the lengths of most generally used URLs are between 37 characters and 87 characters. When a longer URL is inserted into a message which has limited length, it will take up the limited message length space, so that the remaining space used for a user to input text becomes inadequate, and the message length may exceed the limitation.